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Thursday, September 18, 2014

Even SDOs have customers.

It has been a while since I
have felt the need to vent in this space, but the events of today lead to
exasperation and venting here in public/private seems like a good way of
dealing with it.

I will tell you that I have
spent nearly my whole career in and around standards development, some at the
very local level, some provincial, and some national, and a lot
international.In the beginning, I think
my major motivating driver was ego, that I was in a space where I could “impose”
my ideas on a larger professional group.After a short while this wears off, and the driver gets replaced by
being motivated to have your profession steered by sound principles that come
in large part from understanding customer needs.By listening to what other laboratorians tell
me, I am told that I am competent at translating those needs into requirements
that work well in standards at all levels.

For example, when working
with laboratories in developing countries it was pretty obvious that the best
way to introduce quality management principles was to break a sophisticated
document like ISO 15189 (medical laboratories – requirements for quality and competence)
into bite size pieces and introduce them on chunk at a time, along with
mentorship assistance until they have worked through a series of implementation
and gap analyses until they are ready for international accreditation.

That is now a very common and popular model
for success.

I have had my successes and
I have had my failures, perhaps the largest being my inability to get the
measurement of uncertainty removed as a requirement from biology based
laboratories.From what I can see, after
20 years of experimenting with uncertainty, few laboratories get it, and the
consequence is that they throw some numbers into a formula and get a number
which they then ignore, as quite rightly they should.

I will say that from the
laboratorians that I talk with, and increasingly the number of accreditation
bodies that have to work with the standard, I see that the tide is slowly
turning, and in time I will be vindicated.Sooner or later, the customer is always right.

But today was not about MU,
it was about a clearly and shining arrogance displayed when some standards
developers are intent on pointing out how smart they are and how dumb are the
people that are going to be required to use the documents they are
creating.

One person actually relayed
a story about how he went to talk with a significant user and asked why he was
concerned about a new standard version being created and was told that the new
version was not going to work well with his peers.He felt the new version deviated substantially
from the existing version.

As he recounted his story
his response was along the lines of “this fellow is a nice guy and I consider
him a friend, but in this case he was dead wrong and his opinion was garbage.”Good way of listening to the document
users.

Then he went on to say that
the document that was being created was complicated by including definitions of
terms when they could be equally found in another document.The solution was simple.Take them out of the new document and require
users to buy two documents, one with the standard, and another with the definitions.“When you buy a book, if you don’t understand
the words then you go out a buy a dictionary.”Good attitude towards addressing customer needs.

What was interesting that
this group also thought it was be a good idea to go through a document
validation process before making a decision on next steps.For those unfamiliar with the concept, document
validation means going to a group of users and asking them if they understand
the document and discover if their understanding is consistent and compatible
with what the crafters intend.It actually
is a good idea, but can be a lengthy and complex process, and requires an open
mind and the ability to accept criticism.It is the Check step of PDCA.

With what I heard today I
think we have all the makings of a new PDCA – Plan, Do, Check, and Argue that the
customer is a jerk and just doesn’t appreciate how much smarter we are than
they.